IBM Shatters Record for Business Intelligence Performance; RS/6000 SP System with DB2 Tops More Expensive Competition on New Benchmark

Business Wire, April 28, 2000

Business/Technology Editors

SOMERS, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 28, 2000

IBM today announced that its next generation RS/6000 SP system with DB2 Universal Database Version 7.1 has set a new record for business intelligence performance in the TPC-H benchmark, easily beating the previous record at a price performance raitio of three times better than the competition.

The achievement reaffirms the SP with DB2 Universal Database as the leading computing platform for large-scale business intelligence applications.

The TPC-H benchmark was designed as a tool to evaluate real-world business intelligence performance. Because it places a focus on a system's ability to efficiently execute complex ad hoc queries, the benchmark becomes more difficult to run as the size of the database grows. IBM elected to run the benchmark test at one terabyte, the level most indicative of the massive amounts of data used in today's enterprise business intelligence applications. The RS/6000 SP, fueled by innovative IBM copper microprocessor technology, rose to the challenge, demonstrating unprecedented power, scalability and a price/performance ratio three times better than Compaq, the previous record holder.

"The RS/6000 SP has moved to the head of the class as a platform for business intelligence and e-business," said Shaku Atre, president of the Atre Group, a New York-based industry consulting firm. "The achievement at one terabyte on the new TPC-H benchmark is a clear indication of IBM's ability to deliver exceptional performance and scalability for business intelligence applications under the most demanding of circumstances."

In TPC-H benchmark testing at 1 terabyte, a 32-node RS/6000 SP system with IBM's DB2 Universal Database Version 7.1 and AIX Version 4.3.3, achieved a Composite Queries per-Hour rating of 12,866.8 QphH with a price performance of $670. Benchmark details are highlighted below:

                                    IBM RS/6000 SP
                                       with DB2
 Hardware               128 Power3 processors at 375 MHz, 128
                                      GB Memory
                                   1120 SSA drives
 Database                            DB2 UDB 7.1
 Operating System                     AIX 4.3.3
 Total System Cost                    $8,614,441
 Composite Query
  per Hour QphH
  @ 1000 GB                             12,866.8
 Price/Performance                       $670
 $/QphH @ 1000 GB
 Availability Date                 August 15, 2000


                             Compaq Alpha Cluster with Informix

 Hardware                   64 Alpha 700 MHz processors, 128 GB
                                           Memory
                                        1770 drives
 Database                             Informix XPS 8.3
 Operating System                  Compaq Tru64UNIX V4.0F
 Total System Cost                      $14,139,152
 Composite Query
  per Hour QphH
  @ 1000 GB                                6,514.1
 Price/Performance                         $2,171
 $/QphH @ 1000 GB
 Availability Date                    November 1, 1999

"The IBM RS/6000 SP is designed to host the world's most demanding workloads and that is why it excels at large-scale business intelligence tasks," said Rod Adkins, general manager, IBM RS/6000."The new copper-enhanced SP system with DB2 and AIX provides not only industry-leading performance, but also superior affordability, scalability and availability to meet customer's requirements for unparalleled business intelligence processing power."

"This record-setting performance demonstrates how DB2 Universal Database is optimized to fully exploit the RS/6000 and help companies obtain timely answers to complex questions," said Janet Perna, general manager, IBM Data Management Solutions."The best e-businesses leverage every bit of information they have, which requires the analysis of large amounts of information very rapidly. Companies around the world have chosen DB2 Universal Database with the RS/6000 SP as the cornerstone of their business intelligence solutions, reflecting IBM's committment to scale solutions in support of their growing business needs."

With more than 8,500 SP systems installed, IBM continues to enhance its Deep Computing technology. The RS/6000 SP in this benchmark used 4-way, 64-bit SMP nodes with the recently introduced copper-based Power3-II microprocessor running at 375 MHz and a Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) disk subsystem. Available in configurations up to 512 nodes, IBM deployed only 32 nodes to easily double the TPC-H performance previously recorded by Compaq.

IBM Tops In High Performance Computing

IBM is the leader in high performance computing according to the TOP500 list of Supercomputers, a semi-annual report that tracks the use of supercomputers by universities, government labs and a wide array of businesses. IBM leads with 141 systems -- all RS/6000 SPs -- up 36 percent from one year ago.

Business Intelligence Expertise

Business intelligence -- including data warehousing, data mining and on-line analytical processing (OLAP) tools -- allows companies to gain additional insights from their data. One of the fastest growing segments of the enterprise IT sector, it is growing more than 43 percent a year and is expected to reach $148 billion by 2003, according to the BI/DW Research Program at Survey.com (http://www.survey.com).